Re: I've thought better of Linux

cstacy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx (Christopher C. Stacy) writes:

> "joesb" <joesb.coe9@xxxxxxxxx> writes:

> I have been running Debian Sarge on my totally generic
> machine for the last year. Here's a short list of
> complaints off the top of my head.
>
> 1. It just doesn't work with my generic (HP) scroll mouse.
> I can't figure out why. (Actually, it starts out working,
> for a few minutes, then it totally stops working!)

With some mice, you can get complications arising between gpm (the
mouse driver for the text consoles) and X. When I had some problems
with an optical mouse, I found the solution was very simple. All I had
to do was follow advice from the gpm man pages on setting up gpm to
use 'raw' mode. Check the gpm HOWTOs and google and I'm sure you find
a straight forward solution. Alternatively, try disabling/turning off
gpm before starting X.


> 2. Cut and paste do not work in the applications that I use
> (eg. paste a URL or text between Emacs and Firefox).

I suspect this is also due to a misconfigured mouse. As mentioned,
either its interference between gpm and the X mouse driver or you have
not configured the mouse driver correctly in XF86Config. Is the scroll
wheel working? If not, its very likely you have the mouse configured
for a very basic 3 button mouse rather than a 5 button scroll wheel
mouse.
>
> 3. Sound doesn't work right.
> Audio applications mess up and even crash all over the place.

Which sound subsystem are you running - OSS or Alsa? Apparently Alsa
is the direction Linux is going with its sound subsystem. However, I'm
still using OSS based subsystem and it works really well for me. I do
a lot of sound related work, including a lot of Text-to-speech type
applications and they work really well.
>
> 4. I had to manually add and configure the totally
> generic network device driver.

Did you add the kernel module for the network driver to the
/etc/modules file and run update-modules?
>
> 5. I had to manually configure X for the totally generic
> video card. And I fucked something up: when Gnome launches,
> there's an extra mouse cursor ("X") sitting in the middle
> of the screen. It's a turd. I can make it go away
> by launching a shell and clicking on its titlebar.
> Then I close that shell, because I do everything from Emacs.
> (Clicking on the Emacs titlebar doesn't clear the turd.)

Again, almost certainly a misconfigured mouse driver for X. Get that
sorted out and many of your problems will go away. Doubt it is
anything to do with the vdeo settings. Note that recent versions of
the X server have a switch which you can use that will get the server
to return what it thinks is your hardware and how it should be
configured. This can be very useful when trying to diagnose
problems. Also note that using the frame buffer device is a useful way
to get X to work on video hardware it doesn't automatically support. I
have only needed this once, when putting Linux on a Dell laptop about
6 years ago. At that time, Linux didn't support the video chipset -
using the virtual frame buffer device overcame this limitation and
Linux worked without issues running X on the laptop.
>
> 5. I tried using KDE, but when I tried to customize the
> Start menu, the system got all confused, lost apps, etc.

Personally, I hate overly complex window managers. I've got rid of
Gnome, KDE etc and now just run sawfish, which I really like as its
very simple, but being written in rep, is nice an lispish and very
easy to extend. My whole X session consists of

#!/bin/bash --login
xsetroot -solid black &
xscreensaver -no-splash &
xload -bg black -fg green -hl red -update 5 -geometry 170x69+4-4 &
xmailbox -geometry 64x38+607-1 &
pload -bg black -fg green -logscale -horiz -incolor cyan -outcolor red -device eth0 -geometry 241x69+181-5 &
xmem -bg black -fg green -geometry 177x71+427-4 &
swisswatch -geometry 100x100-3--11 &
ssh-add &
if [ -x /usr/bin/sawfish ]; then
exec /usr/bin/sawfish
else
echo "Error: /usr/bin/sawfish could not be executed"
exec xterm -geometry 80x24+0+0
fi

this is running on a Debian Testing distro.


> I know there are even more desktop/window environments.
> Why can't Linux just pick ONE and make that really WORK?
> At least as well as Windows?

Firstly, the comment "Why can't Linux just pick ONE and make that
really WORK?" reveals what I think is a basic conceptual
flaw. Firstly, it implies Linux is something akin to a company like
Microsoft or Apple. In reality, Linux is just the kernel and a few
utils. All the rest is really just packages collected by the Distro
(Debian, Red Hat, SuSe, etc). Therefore, there is no central body to
just "pick one and make it work". I'd also argue many of the window
managers do work as well and even better than Windows. How many of us
have defined a colour scheme under windows only to find some apps
refuse to follow it, or even worse, follow only part of it and you end
up with dialog boxes or windows using the same colour for the
foreground and background?

> I suppose I should be thankful that the entire destkop
> doesn't crash all the time, like it did a few years ago.

I sometimes wonder why it is I hear about people having all these
problems, yet I've never really experienced them. Its true that back
when I first started using Linux, I did have some hardware
compatibility problems, but I've not had these for a long time
now. I've NEVER in over 10 years of Linux had my desktop crash
once. I've never had my system do anything equivelent to a blue screen
of death or lock up on me. I have had apps crash now and again and
even lock up, but always been able to rercover without a system
reboot. I have had to spend some time geting unusual hardware working,
but I've had that sort of problem with every OS I've ever used (I
still can't get XP to work with my old HP scanner - luckily, it worked
with Linux first go).

>
> 7. The "security update notification" widget doesn't work.
> It beeps and complains that security upgrades are ready.
> Then it launches Synaptic, which doesn't agree.
> I am left wondering what critical security patches I am missing.

What have you got in your /etc/apt/sources.list file? have you got the
site for the security updates as well as the normal source sites? I
rarely using anything other than apt-get since thats pretty much what
all the other tools use under the hood anyway. sometimes, I may use
dselect, but thats pretty rare. As I tend to use the "testing" distro
of debian, I don't worry too much about the security updates as they
just end up in the normal testing archives anyway (You only need the
security updates url in the sources.list file when your running the
stable distro as security updates are not placed in the normal archive
area for the distro, but rather in the specific security archive
area).


> By running apt manually, I suspect the problem is
> related either to qpopper or wine. I think these problems
> first manifested the week that Sarge became Stable.
> I suppose I ought to look into them.

What does qpopper or wine have to do with apt and security updates?
Isn't one a pop server and the other a windows emulator?

>
> 8. I spent two hours yesterday trying to install a working imapd.
> Tried several different packages. No success so far.

I don't run imapd on my desktop - don't have any use for it, so can't
help with this one.

> 9. Maybe it's an xinetd problem.
> Nothing like having to manually configure a seperate inetd.
> It's supposed to be a replacement, but it's not actually
> integrated into the system! Applications install as inetd,
> then I run some perl script over inetd.conf and manually
> edit the xinetd. Someday I think some package will need
> to configure and start a network service before completing
> installation. I just can't wait to watch that nightmare.

I didn't like xinetd very much. We do run it at work on our Red Hat
based servers. For a desktop machine, inetd is fine as I use iptables
to control who has access from where and to what, so there is not real
security issue with inetd.
>
> 10. Tried to get my friend to run Debian, since he wanted
> to use Linux for some program development.
>
> But Sarge doesn't work with his generic video card on
> the generic $400 AMD64 system he bought the other day
> at the computer store. If he wants to run Sarge, he will
> have to hire a consultant to manually configure X Windows.
> I haven't been able to help him over the phone, because
> he understandably lost patience trying to debug this.
> I am sure there would have been many more problems,
> but not having a display screen was the first show stopper.
>
> RedHat (Fedora) and Knoppix do come up on his machine.
> So he's running Knoppix, but with all the problems,
> he's abandoned Linux for now, and the machine just
> sits there. He uses Windows XP, instead.
> He's been a system programmer for 25 years, too,
> but he has practically no experience with Unix.
> At work (doing real-time embedded systems),
> he uses RedHat, which someone else set up and maintains.
>
> Windows 2000 and XP "just works" perfectly out of the box,
> in all those respects. If you're not sure: that means you
> merely apply AC power to the system, and you're done.
>
> Let us not even speak about trying to do "advanced" things
> like set up local network file sharing on Linux.
> Yes, of course, I have samba working on my network.
> But on Windows, you just do this by clicking on menu items
> named "Share" and "Permissions"; nothing else needed.
>
> I'm a system programmer and have administered probably
> every kind of Unix-based system over the last 25 years
> for both tiny and huge organizations of various kinds.
> If my perception is that Linux doesn't work "out of the box",
> it's a safe bet that newbies who just want to turn on their
> desktop and get to work will be in for a very rough ride.
>
> I wouldn't try to kid them.
> You're just going to wind up souring them on Linux.
>
> I had to reinstall my Windows 2000 desktop last week.
> That horrible nightmare happens about twice a year.
> But it's far less time than I spend trying to make Linux work.
>
> But I also have extensive experience with Windows 2000
> in a server environment, and I would NOT recommend that!
> Some flavor of Unix is going to be much better.
> Lately, I use BSD and Debian for that, and Debian has
> been much better in that role than BSD, to my surprise.
> I once tried to install Gentoo, and that was a bad joke.
> Maybe Gentoo will get better, though.
> In the recent past I've had very good luck with Solaris.
>
> For a desktop, I would always recommend Macintosh.
> (I wish I was using MacOS X, myself...)

What I really find hard to understand is all the people out there who
continually make comparisons with commercial OSs like Windows and OS X
to "free" ones like Linux and BSD and then complain about how lousy
they are when they don't get the same degree of polish or "out of the
box" support. There is no such thing as a free lunch. If you don't
want to pay for a polished commercial product, be prepared to put in a
little extra brain time to figure some of it out.

For your friend who wants Linux to do some development, but doesn't
want to spend time trying to work things out and configure the system,
then pay for a commercial Linux distro like Red Hat Workstation - its
still relatively cheap and you get support (but check their support
matrix to ensure your hardware will be supported).

Tim



--
Tim Cross
The e-mail address on this message is FALSE (obviously!). My real e-mail is
to a company in Australia called rapttech and my login is tcross - if you
really need to send mail, you should be able to work it out!
.